I have been reading a 2026 book by David Epstein titled Inside the Box: How constraints make us better. At Google Books there is a preview up to page 23. He describes a different viewpoint about plagiarism in preaching. Chapter 6 is titled The Remix of Everything. Selected from pages 87 to 93, he says:
“Keith Miller was working on his English PhD at Texas Christian University in 1983, analyzing the rhetorical techniques in Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons, when a friend alerted him to something strange.
The friend was studying at Vanderbilt University’s seminary, and had come across a 1968 King sermon –‘The Drum Major Instinct’ – that had a lot in common with a 1952 sermon (‘Drum Major Instincts’) by the prominent preacher J. Wallace Hamilton. Both use similar language to describe the human instinct to want to lead the parade and be recognized.
Miller assumed this was a one-off instance, until one day when he was perusing books in his father’s office. Rev. Ernest Miller was the head of a congregation in McAllen Texas, right along the border of Mexico, and he had a large library. Keith Miller was flipping through a text of old sermons when he landed on another with the same exact title as a sermon that King delivered later. It also used the same opening anecdote. Maybe ‘The Drum Major Instinct’ wasn’t an isolated instance after all.
Miller asked his father to list notable preachers. He took the list to the TCU seminary library and combed books of their sermons. Then he went to Atlanta to interview Martin Luther King Sr. and King’s mentor, Benjamin Mays, a minister and the former president of Morehouse College, from which King graduated at nineteen.
The more sermons Miller read, the more he realized he was rereading. He found shared titles, structures, anecdotes, and turns of phrase between King’s sermons and those of other preachers. Almost every sermon and essay of King’s he could find – even his Nobel Prize lecture – contained at least some historical antecedent. Sometimes it was the order of specific points, or common literary reference, or exact descriptions of a Biblical lesson. Sometimes it was all of the above. Take, for example, the sermon ‘What Is Man?’
….The more Miller read, the more tangled the web of influence and borrowing appeared to be. But he also found that King wasn’t unique; he was representative. Had Miller been a noir-film detective, his cork-board of evidence would have been completely obscured by red string connecting preachers and their sermons. King’s version was just the latest iteration in a deep ‘What Is Man?’ lineage.
….Keith Miller ended up writing not only a dissertation but a full book exhaustively tracing the source material of King’s sermons and essays; Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources. Miller explained that King grew up in the folk-preaching tradition – beginning with watching his father – in which borrowing words was not only encouraged but expected, and language was not thought of as proprietary.
Excessive originality, in fact, was seen as self-centered, if not downright suspicious. The idea of ‘preaching to the choir’ – an expression that connotes a redundant message – was a good thing. Listeners expected the reinforcement and recharging of lessons with authority and familiarity, not originality. Sermons were treated like songs, shared and adapted readily for an audience that expected to hear a version of the hits. ‘My father went to seminary at the same time King did,’ Miller told me, ‘and he actually borrowed from some of the same books of sermons.’
The importance of borrowing has often been missed in King scholarship. Entire books have been written on the 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and not even mentioning that the famously off-script crescendo (repeating ‘let freedom ring from . . .’) was adapted from the conclusion of an address given by King’s friend Archibald Carey Jr. in 1952, which itself echoed the conclusion of a speech by investigative journalist and activist Ida B. Wells in 1893. (‘I’d used in many times before,’ King said later).
Borrowing was so common that mid-twentieth century preachers would occasionally pester one another to publish their sermons so that they could be riffed upon, like jazz standards. One distinguished New York City minister repeatedly welcomed King to his pulpit, after King reworked and published a version of that preacher’s own sermon. Another pastor was an editor at a magazine that published a King homily based on that pastor’s own work. Preachers regularly accepted this from one another for a good reason: It worked. Acquaintances borrowed from each other, and from popular orators like Fosdick and Hamilton, who published their sermons and preached to millions over the radio. King purposely chose widely used material. It provided Virginia Woolf’s ‘rope’ that must be thrown to the audience if they are to coma along with something new.”
….When King graduated from Morehouse and entered Crozer Theological Seminary, he was surrounded by white people for the first time. His tactic for satisfying professors fit squarely within the folk-preaching tradition: He wrote papers that remixed and repeated back the professors’ own beliefs. He graduated at the top of his class, and received a fellowship and an award given by the faculty to the most outstanding student.
After Crozer, King continued to refine his practice of borrowing, remixing, and building on work that he knew his audience already accepted. He did it both in environments where it was acceptable – preaching from the pulpit – and in others where it was decidedly not. Near the top of his 1955 PhD dissertation at Boston University, King highlighted one of his sources: ‘In 1952 a very fine dissertation was done in this school by Jack Boozer.’ That dissertation had been presented to the very same thesis adviser. As ever, King was building on material he knew his target audience had already approved. But. As he did with sermons, King copied some passages directly from Boozer. In the late 1980s researchers at Stanford University’s Kings Papers Project discovered the dissertation plagiarism. Soon it exploded in national headlines, and a Boston University committee was convened to determine whether to revoke King’s doctorate. Ultimately, the committee decided not to strip the degree, because King was not alive to defend himself and because the dissertation still made ‘an intelligent contribution to scholarship.’ Academic papers prize strict originality – to such a degree that they almost never connect with any audience at all. That was no use to King, and he regularly violated the norms of scholarly writing by doing what he had learned in the gospel tradition.”
There is an article by Josh Howerton on September 9, 2022 titled On “Sermon Plagiarism” Accusations. And rather ironically, another article by Theodore Pappas in Chronicles magazine for May 1998 titled The Life and Times of the King Plagiarism Story discusses how King’s estate charges licensing fees for using ‘his’ content. Also, there is a Wikipedia page titled Martin Luther King Jr. authorship issues.
The image of Dr. King came from Wikimedia Commons.
